Wednesday, February 18, 2015

John "Junior" Gotti wants to make one thing perfectly clear — he’s not a rat.

In a sitdown with the Daily News, the mob scion and his lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman gave their most detailed explanation to date of Gotti’s stunning decision to sit down with federal prosecutors in 2005 for a proffer session where he discussed crimes of his own — and of other mobsters in the Gambino crime family.

But he insists the “rat” label is unfair, because he intentionally provided bad information to the feds he felt sick talking to.

“No one got indicted,” said Gotti, who recently published a memoir titled “Shadow of My Father.”

“No one suffered but me.”

Gotti acknowledged that his old-school father, the late Gambino boss John Gotti, would never have approved of the legal strategy. But Junior said he was in a bad place at the time.

He was facing trial on racketeering and stock fraud charges that could put him away for 100 years if he were convicted. Gotti was furious over the indictment because he thought federal prosecutors had given him coverage on those alleged charges from a prior plea agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office.

Gotti said he planned to give the feds information that was either useless or out-and-out false, and refused to ever testify against anyone. He hoped that prosecutors would give him a sweetheart plea deal while he would get two of his archenemies, reputed capo Daniel Marino and associate Joseph "Joe the German" Watts, jammed up with the feds.

The plan made no sense to anyone except Gotti — and got him excoriated as a “rat” by his ex-underling John Alite.

Joseph "Joe the German" Watts was an archenemy of Gotti.

Alite cut a deal to get out of prison and somehow got ahold of the five-page summary of Gotti’s blabbing, and published the secret FBI report in his memoir, “Gotti’s Rules.”

“I gave (prosecutors) inaccurate information,” Gotti insisted. “I’m not proud of this. To this day it still bothers me. I will never, ever, ever be a cooperator. I made a mistake. Just the fact that I was in the room with them (feds) made me physically sick. I gamed them and gamed myself.

Just the fact that I was in the room with them (feds) made me physically sick. I gamed them and gamed myself.

“That was 45 minutes I’m still paying for. Not one person was incarcerated. I never even offered to be debriefed, I refused to ever testify and I even walked in with my own script of notes to just give them information on a handful of useless subjects and false information.”

Lichtman said he was initially against the idea of his client meeting with prosecutors but came around when he was able to work out unique ground rules: Gotti would not discuss the pending charges in the indictment and would only talk about subjects of his own choosing.
Gotti speaks to the press from his home in 2009.

“The information he wanted to provide was useless as it was either beyond the statute of limitations, insignificant state crimes or, as I learned afterward, actually filled with falsehoods,” Lichtman told The News.

“It was an utter scam in the sense that it was not a real proffer — it was a ‘meet and greet’ with our providing some token good faith with this information. What he did, I learned later, was putting people into crimes who were already dead.”

Lichtman was referring to Gotti’s recounting of the 2003 murder of Danny Silva in a Queens bar.

Gotti claimed among those involved in the melee was Joey Curio — but Gotti said he knew full well that Curio wasn’t there because he had been slain three years earlier.

“It was an utter and complete farce,” Lichtman said of the proffer.

“I didn’t know he was going to lie, but we were clear with each other that he was going to give them bulls — that couldn’t go anywhere. In the end, he felt that by just going in as a Gotti for a proffer he might be able to hurt his enemies. It was a crazy idea and once we refused to go back for another debriefing that was the end of it and we mercifully could start and finish trial preparation.”

Gotti can’t be prosecuted for providing the feds with phony info, because the statute of limitations has run out.

Two former federal prosecutors who attended the session declined to comment on Gotti’s assertions.

Gotti, who turned 51 on Valentine’s Day, also gave The News his first public explanation of his mysterious stabbing outside a Long Island drugstore in 2013.

He said he was wounded breaking up a fight between two crackheads he knew — and has no regrets.

“If I had to do it all over again I would,” Gotti said.
Gotti was stabbed in the parking lot of a CVS drugstore in Syosset in 2013.
Daniel Marino was another mob foe.

Gotti refused to cooperate with Nassau County cops and prosecutors investigating the Nov. 10, 2013, stabbing in the parking lot of a CVS drugstore in Syosset.

Adding to the mystery, there were no witnesses, no surveillance video cameras at the parking lot, and cops found no bloodstains.

Gotti said he was home watching the Sunday night football game between the Saints and the Cowboys when “someone I’ve known my whole life called and said he had a problem at the CVS parking lot in Syosset just 2 miles from my house and asked for my help.”

“I got to the parking lot and two guys were fighting. I knew both of them,” he said, adding that they were “crackheads.”

“I tried to break up the fight and one of them pulled out a knife, swung it wildly, and the knife caught me in my lower abdomen,” he said. “The second cut missed my heart and caught the back of my stomach, about 4 inches deep.”

Gotti drove himself to Syosset Hospital, where he underwent surgery. While he was recovering in the hospital, he used the alias “Critical Kane” for privacy, he said.

“The one person who got me involved apologized for it, but I still don’t know which of the two stabbed me,” Gotti said.

Gotti explained that he did not meet with authorities because the stabbing was “a complete and total accident.” His wife, though, took a dimmer view of his rush to be a good Samaritan.

“The way my wife looks at it, ‘After all, you’ve been through, to be laying dead in a parking lot?’ ” Gotti said.